


Quiet

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 08:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17220629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: A 90-year-old Sarah Jacobs looks back on her life.





	Quiet

It’s well past eleven and the nursery is quiet, soft and muted in the glow of the nightlight. Baby Rebecca is breathing peacefully in her crib, besides a teddy bear who is bigger than she is. Rebecca is the fourth of Les’ great grand children, but her curly black hair reminds Sarah of David more than anything.

Les is gone, and David is gone. Sarah has had decades upon decades to come to terms with the loss of her brothers, even as she has watched the family flourish. Sarah is old now. Her hair is long and white, her face wrinkled. She can’t walk very far anymore. The children listen to stories about living in a one room apartment with an outhouse and no electricity. Three of her great great grandnieces pool their money to buy her a Walkmen for Hanukkah. They introduce her to their music, and she shows them things — newspaper clippings and yellowing dime novels with sixty year old flowers pressed between the pages. She tries, with all her might, not to be one of those old people who holds the present generation’s gratitude hostage with stories of how hard she had it when she was young. It wasn’t all bad back then, anyway. She wishes she had been able to spend more time at school, and she wishes she hadn’t spent so much of her youth sewing lace for other people’s wedding dresses, but sometimes she misses the songs that she used to sing with the other girls at the lace factory, and the whispers about how they were going to turn the world around.

Sarah has changed the world in her way. There have been strikes, and protests, and suffragette marches, and she has been a part of them, one voice amongst many, but there when she needed to be. She isn’t the face of any movement, but she whispers and encourages. When one grand niece tells her that boys are icky, Sarah tells her that the sweetest years of her life were spent in a little house with a writer named Josephine, who she loved very much. When a great great grand niece does a school report on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Sarah helps her to edit it, and tells her about friends who worked there.

There’s something about babies that makes Sarah think about the progression of history. Each year that Sarah has lived has brought about new changes. New York is the same city it always was, but at the same time it isn’t. Little Rebecca might live to be a hundred if God is willing, and she might see things that Sarah can’t even imagine. When Sarah reaches out to touch her little cheek, she knows that she is touching the future.


End file.
